User blog:BeastMan14/Historical Review: "Pulp Fiction" Proves Timeless, If A Bit Excessive
When you’re a director whose just had a beloved debut, often the biggest challenge is attempting to follow up your first work with a superior, or at least equal, successor. Naturally, this has been hit or miss. Spielberg followed up Duel with Jaws. M. Night Shyamalan followed The Sixth Sense with Unbreakable. Josh Trank followed up Chronicle with Fant4stic. Richard Kelly followed up Donnie Darko with Southland Tales. Given that you’ve probably heard of the first two directors but not the second, you can guess who hit and who missed. Of course, if you ask a lot of people what their favorite second film from a director is, you’ll get a lot of people saying Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s follow-up to Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction is rightfully a classic because it’s an example of a talented director taking their ideas and experimenting with them to create a whole new animal, something bigger in scale that feel bigger in scale, different but familiar. It really is the film where, to paraphrase Christian Bale in American Psycho, Tarantino really comes into his own, critically and commercially. A problem with directorial follow-ups is that some directors will just decide to do “My first movie, but it’s more expensive.” And while that’s certainly a way to do it, it usually results in an unsatisfying follow-up. Tarantino clearly understood this failing, because he swiftly pulls the rug out from under the audience with the film’s opening. Like Reservoir Dogs, it opens with a conversation in a diner, but instead of a group of men, it’s a couple who are discussing how easy it is to rob restaurants compared to banks or liquor stores before standing up and telling everyone that this is a robbery. Unlike Reservoir Dogs, we know immediately that these characters are criminals, but their banter and clear affection for each other still makes them endearing. When the opening credits are over, we realize we’re getting more of Tarantino’s signature non-linear storytelling, but rather than using it to flesh out characters through flashbacks, Tarantino uses it scramble the narrative, turning it into an anthology of sorts that leaves the audience questioning the odd details of certain scenes and changing our perceptions of characters based on new information. The most clever usage of this is the portrayal of Vincent Vega, the film’s apparent hero (played with sleazy charm by John Travolta), who, with the hindsight added by the flashbacks, is revealed to be a bumbling junkie who can barely think straight when the situation falls apart. As another twist, the story of Pulp Fiction is much more bittersweet than the unapologetically meaner Reservoir Dogs, using the fondness and nostalgia for the films, music, and television of Tarantino’s youth to match the feelings of characters that long for better days. Mia Wallace (played with sultry perfection by Uma Thurman) longs for her days as an actress, Vega constantly talks about his trip to Europe, and Butch Coolidge (in an underrated turn from Bruce Willis) feels like a man born in the wrong era, a gruff, honorable gunslinger trapped in a crime thriller, whose obsession with his family heirloom puts him in immense danger. The only way to make it out of the story, it seems, is to give up on the past and look towards the future. Not only does Tarantino use his old tricks, but he’s able to use the film’s longer runtime and bigger budget to showcase them much more effectively. The tracking shot, originally used as a cool trick to keep us compelled in Reservoir Dogs, is used multiple times here to represent disorientation and chaos. (A slightly high Vince’s long walk through the 50’s restaurant feels like an auditory and visual nightmare rather than a fun stroll down memory lane. The use of music, originally just for a scant few scenes, often plays through every scene, doing everything from establishing sexual tension to delivering violent catharsis. Of course, a longer runtime doesn’t entirely work out here, and Pulp Fiction begins to feel it’s time near the end of the Butch storyline, though it quickly picks up again when the perspective shifts to Jules. On top of his mainstays, we get to see in Pulp Fiction the start of something that, when he does it right, Tarantino is one of the absolute masters of: building suspense, showcased in the iconic sequence in which Jules, in a powerhouse, tragically Oscar snubbed turn from Samuel L Jackson, interrogates Brett, the man who stole Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase. It starts as a simple scene of Jules simply talking to Brett, the knowledge that he’s there for the case making both him (and the viewer) uneasy, with the conversation of food and respect turning almost instantly when an annoyed Jules gets fed up with Brett and coldly executes his friend. After several minutes of quiet tension, it almost feels like a release when the guns come out. You can trace the line from this to other similarly tense moments in Tarantino’s filmography, from Bill’s conversation with the Bride on the steps of the church in Kill Bill Vol. 2 to Hans Landa’s interrogation of the man hiding Jews in Inglorious Basterds. The blending of old and new fits the aesthetic of the film, which frequently blends both American classics and the French New Wave to create something unique. Despite overstaying it's welcome, the entire story of Butch Coolidge feels like the best example of the film’s seemingly contradictory nature. One of Butch’s defining actions is his killing of Vincent, a metaphor for the traditional American hero overcoming the fresher, seemingly more fashionable one, in brilliantly cold fashion, throwing away what feels like a built-up rivalry from their limited interaction for a reminder that death is quick, cheap, and ultimately meaningless. As the closest thing the film has to a traditional hero, Butch survives by mixing past with present (literally arming himself with a katana, an almost certain reference to the influence of samurai films over the western, the genre the fittingly named Butch is clearly inspired by) and overcomes brutal odds to literally ride off in the sunset, a fate shared by Jules, who gives up on his violent lifestyle and practically defies the rule of the universe by letting the robber couple leave instead of killing them like he very easily could’ve. Tarantino is accused of being too loving of his influences, too willing to homage his favorites to tell a story all his own, but the nostalgia of Pulp Fiction serves the greater purpose of making a statement on the importance of letting go of the past and moving into the future. Hypothetical Ballot Spots: *Best Picture *Best Director *Best Original Screenplay *Best Actor - John Travolta *Best Supporting Actor - Samuel L Jackson *Best Supporting Actress - Uma Thurman *Best Film Editing *Best Sound Category:Blog posts Category:Historical Reviews